2023 uiguides
6
edits
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Bio update for 2023
<span style="font-size:medium">Alex Santarelli</span>
<span style="font-size:medium">http://universityinnovation.org/images/b/b2/DSC07362_copy.jpg</span>
<span style="font-size:medium">'''My passion is impacting others through tech, design, music, and fun.'''</span>
<span style="font-size:small">UIF Fellow 2018/2019 @ Loyola University Maryland</span>
<u><span style="font-size:small">About me:</span></u>
I had an unconventional path for my college experience. My first year in college was at Loyola University Maryland where I served as a UIF fellow for my school. After my first year at Loyola, I wanted to work with my best friend Samir and be in a city. So I ended up transferring into New York University. Whenever I didn’t have classes I was working on projects with Samir. We ended up on a whim making Spotify wrapped but for Apple Music because we were feeling left out. An awesome by product of making that app was that [https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/26/apple-music-subscribers-can-now-get-their-own-year-in-review-too-thanks-to-this-app/ TechCrunch], [https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/26/18156750/apple-music-year-in-review-listening-habits-2018-app-noisehub theVerge] and [https://www.billboard.com/pro/app-year-in-review-apple-music-noisehub/ Billboard] ended up writing an article about it. Fast forward to the second semester at NYU (Spring 2019), classes weren’t very engaging and I didn’t feel like it was worth the tuition I had to pay as a transfer student.
Looking for something fun to do over the summer that wasn’t working for NYU (I had a job there as a Lead UX Designer, to help pay the bills). I reconnected with my friend Dylan who I met many years ago at Facebook’s F8 conference. Dylan and I met originally because we had both made apps for our high school and were able to attend the conference because we won a student scholarship with our apps. My school app was focused on utility features, his was focused on social features. He ended up raising a seed round and was looking for a founding engineer to help build out the company. [https://www.joinsaturn.com/ Saturn is a social calendar for high schools.]
Late Spring 2019 I joined Saturn and was the first engineer of the company. Saturn was going really well, I loved what I was doing, was learning more than I was in school, and I even convinced Samir to join and be the founding designer for the company. NYU let us take 1 year of absence without having to decide whether we were going to leave school or not. A year after I joined Saturn we were in the middle of Covid; paying full tuition for zoom classes and potentially missing out on Saturn wasn’t something I wanted to do. I dropped out. Saturn grew a lot while I was there. 3 years later when I left due to burn out, we had 50 people at the company and raised a large Series A! The engineering team itself had over 20 people on it. I built the core app experience at Saturn with the help of some incredible teammates over those 3 years. A lot of complex problems that we encountered at Saturn, used human centered design to solve.
The past year I was working at another start up called Fam, which was a houseparty video chat clone and sadly with the state of the market and the app not being a true business, I had to start thinking about what might be next. I learned so much from engineering from the ground up that I wanted to experience how engineering at a large company works. Now I’m at Robinhood as an iOS Engineer.
In my free time I work on various app + business ideas that I get really excited about. Education is something I’m starting to focus on again because I think it is one of the hardest places to institute change, but the most rewarding and necessary. I think the intersection between AI and Education will cause a lot of disruption in ways we can’t even imagine at the moment. I’m also super into music, still iterating on new music app concepts.